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Officials defend Cuba normalization

President Barack Obama’s controversial moves to engage the repressive Castro regime in Cuba will do more than 50 years of embargoes and sanctions to help the island’s residents and U.S. interests, administration officials told a Senate panel on Tuesday.

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Officials defend Cuba normalization

Democrat Washington Bureau
Published 11:13 p.m. ET Feb. 3, 2015

FILE - In this Dec. 17, 2014 file photo, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. speaks on Capitol Hill in Washington. Rubio seems to be moving toward a bid for the Republicans' presidential nomination, and late Sunday he joins Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky for an audience with the conservative billionaire Koch brothers. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)(Photo: AP)

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama’s controversial moves to engage the repressive Castro regime in Cuba will do more than 50 years of embargoes and sanctions to help the island’s residents and U.S. interests, administration officials told a Senate panel on Tuesday.

Cuban dissidents are divided about the administration’s actions, said Tomasz Malinowski, assistant secretary of state for human rights and labor told the Senate Foreign Affairs subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere.

“But this uncertainty — after decades of absolute depressing certainty that nothing can change in Cuba — carries with it a sense of possibility. Our task is to seize that opportunity,” he said.

The White House in December announced the biggest shift in U.S.-Cuba relations since formal ties were severed in 1961. The move includes more trade, banking, and travel between the nations, as well as the establishment of a U.S. embassy in Havana. It does not lift the full embargo that Congress imposed nearly 20 years ago.

Malinowski’s words did little to the mollify senators who are most opposed to the administration’s actions. That includes Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, top-ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, and GOP Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who chaired Tuesday’s hearing.

Both senators are the sons of Cuban immigrants. They repeated earlier criticisms that, in exchange for any recognition, the administration should have demanded a guarantee of human and political rights from the Castro regime, and resolution of U.S. property and business claims worth billions.

“Eighteen months of secret negotiations have produced a bad deal for the Cuban people,” Menendez said. “While it may have been done with the best of intentions, in my view we compromised bedrock principles for virtually no concessions.”

Tuesday’s hearing was the first since the president’s announcement. The House Foreign Affairs Committee has scheduled one for today.

Tuesday’s debate showed the divisions in Congress over what to do about Cuba.

Menendez’s comments criticizing the administration followed remarks from a fellow Democrat, Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, lamenting that the U.S. “has spent the past few decades pursuing a policy that hasn’t worked.”

Even critics of normalization say the president seems to be acting within the scope of his executive powers. But Rubio has threatened to block Obama’s nominee for ambassador to Havana. And Tuesday, he grilled administration officials on whether they would agree to reopening an embassy if Cuba bars U.S. diplomats from meeting with dissidents on the island.

“We’re going to keep pushing to get those restrictions lifted as part of getting an embassy,” responded Roberta S. Jacobson, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs. “I can’t imagine that we would go to the next stage of our diplomatic relationship with an agreement not to seek democracy activists.”